What’s On: Terence Conran

There’s a quote at the end of the new Terence Conran show at London’s Design Museum where he states his design philosophy is to produce items that are “plain, simple and useful,” adding: “Such things many not win any design prizes but neither do they go out of fashion.” It’s a sentence that sums up Conran’s genius – his revolutions have been carried out not by massively left-field ideas, but by reading the popular mood and reacting to it, a designer who understands life and the people who live it.

The Way We Live Now aims to explain how as a maker, designer, retailer, restauranteur and entrepreneur, Conran has helped shape contemporary Britain. His impact is undeniable – he’s widely credited as the reason why so many of us now sleep under duvets for example – but the show is thankfully free of any whiff of haigography. Although there is no real Conran style there is certainly a Conran approach, formed through his interests in manufacturing (“I have never designed anything that I would not know how to make myself,”) and commerce (“Design and business are completely interlinked,”).

But there’s also an understanding of real people, real homes and real concerns, instincts which led him to have the Habitat stores designed and displayed to create a feeling of “generous abundance” and which allow him to shift through the decades in a way that responds to but never slavishly follows aesthetic trends.

The section of the show on Habitat is among the most enjoyable, putting as it did a full stop on the dreariness of post-war Britain and marking the turning the much-trumpeted ideas around the Swinging Sixties into glossy, tangible, affordable goods.

And just as impressive as his ability to move with the times, Conran also has a golden touch when it comes to working across different areas of the same industry. This is exemplifed by the display of chairs from various restaurants he has designed, which are all very different but perfect matches for the spaces in which they inhabit.

We learn too about his love of tools, his obsession with process, walk through a recreation of his office and then read about his “mission” to promote design, a mission which led to the foundation of the very museum in which this show takes place.

This is a cracking, well-curated show which tells the story of Conran and his impact on the UK in a pragmatic and lively way. Apparently he and his peers saw the post war years as “an opportunity to change the world.” Seeing that opportunity and grasping it are very different things though, and this show helps explain how one became the other.

Sustainability can get a bit of a bad rap, but Studio Swine are one of many outfits showing that connotations of hemp trousers and the like are daft and outdated. The duo – who scrubbed up very well indeed in our Winter edition of Printed Pages – has recently added yet another string to their sustainable-but-beautiful bow in the form of these sumptuous Gyrecraft pieces. The decidedly opulent looking works were created thanks to an arduous 1000 nautical mile journey across the seas, which saw a crew using a “Solar Extruder” to draw plastic from the waters. The device works by harnessing sunlight to melt and extrude plastic from the sea, and these little fragments were then used to create five gorgeous objets d’art, one representing each of the five major ocean gyres.

Human Organs-on-Chips has been announced as the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year 2015 winner. Designed by Donald Ingber and Dan Dongeun Huh at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, the chips are devices that carry “living human cells that mimic the complex tissue structures, functions and mechanical motions of whole organs,” says the Design Museum.

“The team of scientists that produced this remarkable object don’t come from a conventional design background. But what they have done is clearly a brilliant piece of design,” says Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic. “They identified a serious problem; how do we predict how human cells will behave, and they solved it with elegance and economy of means, putting technology from apparently unrelated fields to work in new ways."

Powers of Ten is a 1977 film the Eames office made for IBM. It begins with a couple having a picnic in a Michigan park before zooming out every 10 seconds by a factor of 10. It travels as far as 100 million light years into outer space before going into reverse, the camera rocketing back to Earth, back to the USA, back to the park, back to the couple and then onwards into the body of the man we first saw, down through his skin and into his cells.

One glance at Instagram or any interiors blog circa 2015 and it feels like marble, or at least cheap mimicries, are decorating homes everywhere. But there’s none of the ubiquitous “funky” accessory holders or dinnerware in Tomás Alonso’s marble-based project, Lines & Waves. Exploring pattern and stackability, Tomas’ interlocking tables are a thing of true beauty. Machine-milled grooves have been cut into the top and bottom of marble blocks creating objects that look like crinkled salami and giant McCoy’s crisps.

Bigger is always better they say, but when you live in a flat or anywhere that’s not a barn this is impossible, as far as furniture’s concerned. Days spent walking around furniture shops, friends’ houses and skips armed with a tape measure and a recurring sense of disappointment can become disheartening even for the most optimistic shopper. You’re left with a choice; either learn carpentry or buy a table that will give you bruised shins every time you squeeze past. But fear not, for product design company Be-elastic has created SNAP to end all your table-top woes.

We’re drawn to a lot of the projects we cover by their aesthetic qualities but sometimes it seems right and proper to flag up something whose form may not promise much, but whose function is really exciting. So it is with Jorg Neugebauer and Kai Wiehagen’s ChargeDoubler, a USB that halves your charging speed to get your phone back up and running in super quick time.